Gay Israeli-Palestinian Love Story Alienates Many

TORONTO, CANADA - The deck seems stacked against Israeli filmmakers Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky, whose movie "The Bubble" held its international premiere at the Toronto Film Festival this week.
The movie's theme of a gay love affair between an Israeli and a Palestinian alienates conservative audiences in Israel and abroad, and European left-wingers angry at Israeli attacks on Lebanon don't want to see Israeli films at all.
And the movie, which has a strong anti-war message, opened in Israel just weeks before the latest Israel-Hizbollah war, and when war started, the cinemas mostly closed.
"It's not an easy movie to make. It's not as though people in Israel say 'This is beautiful, wow we love it'," said Uchovsky, one of the writers and producers of the film, which his partner Fox directed. "And then you go to the world and the world hates you as well. It's hard."
Set in the self-centered "bubble" of Tel Aviv -- a city reportedly out of touch with the rest of the country -- the film is one of just two Israeli movies at the Toronto festival.
It is far more political -- and far more gay -- than Fox's previous movie "Walk on Water," a bittersweet 2004 comedy of complex ties between Israelis, Germans and Palestinians that became Israel's biggest grossing movie.
The new film looks at what Fox describes as the "tormented region" of the Middle East through the eyes of Noam, from Tel Aviv, and Ashraf, from the Palestinian West Bank, in a love affair that crashes up against politics at almost every turn.
But Fox told Reuters that the issues, including gay love, suicide bombers and cultural misunderstandings, were in line with others that he and Uchovsky had handled in their movie-making careers.
"We've been dealing with explosive subjects and subjects that are not as easy to swallow and handle with all our films," he said, admitting that his dream was that the movie could one day be shown in Arab countries. "The films have reached audiences and created understanding between people."
But for now the challenge is finding festivals to screen Israeli films at all, amid strong pro-Palestinian sentiment, especially in Europe, and distaste for the campaign against Hizbollah and the recent Israeli bombing in Lebanon.
"During and after the war, film festivals canceled screening of Israeli films because of the negative sentiment against Israel, and I can understand some of these emotions and I can identify with some of them," Fox said at the public screening of the movie.
"I think they made a mistake, because it is our job to make films. It's our job to use film as a means of dialog, even in the worst times, when people are making terrible mistakes."
The film, with close parallels to Shakespeare's tragedy, had the working title "Romeo and Julio." But Fox switched to "The Bubble" to better reflect what is going on in Israel today.
"It sounded kind of corny, and we didn't want to just limit ourselves to the love story," he said.
from Reuters